I am a professional lecturer in Game Design at DePaul University. I research the extent to which games may envision queer world-building by studying LGBTQ lived experiences and considering how these may inspire games. I have published in Technical Communications Quarterly, The Journal of Popular Culture, The Video Game Art Reader, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture and Widerscreens. I have presented my research at Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), Southwest Pop American Culture Association (SWPACA), the Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS), GaymerX, and Digital Frontiers.
I am a scholar-practitioner who uses game design as research praxis to explore different ways of presenting my research. I develop games that draw from LGBTQ lived experiences to envision possible interventions for privileged structures of gender and sexuality. With my design lab, I am currently working on a game project that explores possible ways of designing compassionate interventions to the transmission of HIV through games. Bulge Lab, an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) I developed as part of my dissertation, comments on masculinity, body image, and viruses. This ARG has been showcased at The Queerness and Games Conference 2018, Play Make Learn 2018, Different Games Conference 2018, and Melbourne Queer Games Festival 2018. I developed TRANS-Gression as part of my master project at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Some of my designs are available on my itch.io page.
I earned my PhD in Technology and Humanities from Illinois Institute of Technology. In my dissertation, I study games marketed to gay men to interrogate how designers of these media encode gender and sexuality into their artifacts. Here, I consider how games may be designed to challenge normalized understandings of gender and sexuality. As a PhD student, I participated in the HASTAC Scholars Program, a community focused on rethinking digital education, research and academia. In 2016, I was awarded a fellowship through the Game Changer Design Lab through the Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry & Innovation at the University of Chicago.
